Bahamas National Trust

The Bahamas National Trust is a non-profit organisation in the Bahamas that manages the country's twenty-seven national parks. Its headquarters is located in New Providence at The Retreat Gardens on Village Road. The Bahamas National Trust was created by an Act of Parliament in 1959, through the efforts of two groups of conservationists.

In the early 20th century there was concern for the survival of the Caribbean flamingo. The National Audubon Society of the United States urged the Bahamas government to protect the flamingos, which led to passage of the Wildbirds (Protection) Act in 1905.

In the early 1950s, Audubon expert Robert Porter Allen scoured the Caribbean searching for flamingos. In his popular book, On the Trail of Vanishing Birds, Allen found that the colonies on the island of Andros in the Bahamas had already disappeared. He determined that the largest surviving group of Caribbean flamingos inhabited the isolated back-waters of Lake Rosa on Inagua. That is where Allen and the Audubon Society decided to make a stand. A group of influential backers was recruited in Nassau to form a Society for the Protection of the Flamingo, with Arthur Vernay as its leader. Two wardens were hired on Inagua, brothers Samuel and James Nixon, and Audubon helped finance the entire operation.

Explorer Ilia Tolstoy (a grandson of the 19th century Russian writer and a frequent visitor to the Bahamas) had been lobbying the colonial government to set aside some Bahamian islands as protected areas. In 1957 the government agreed to temporarily reserve a 22-mile (35 km) stretch of the Exuma cays, providing that some group would explore the possibility of creating a national park and make concrete recommendations. Meanwhile, Columbia University graduate Carleton Ray had written a book on The Bahamas called The Underwater Guide to Marine Life, which recommended the protection of marine areas in the same way that land areas were protected. Ray teamed up with Tolstoy to mount a new Bahamian expedition, to the Exuma cays, which was organised by January 1958. Allen and other well-known conservationists, including Donald Squires of the American Museum of Natural History and Bahamian experts Oris Russell and Herbert McKinney, were part of the team. They spent a week travelling by boat from Norman's Cay to Conch Cut and their report led to the creation of the world's first land and sea park in the Exumas, as well as to the formation of the Bahamas National Trust itself.

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